Category Archives: Critiques, Theories, and Random Thoughts

Look, I enjoyed Solo. I did. But, well, I didn’t enjoy Solo enough. That movie was a slam-dunk waiting to

I mean, *look* at this scene? How could this not be awesome? How?

happen. It was a gimmie, a freebie – a “no way you can screw this up” sandwich. And yet, somehow…

This phenomenon is not constrained to Solo, either. For long ages it was the province of just about every single superhero movie. It plagued enormous swathes of scifi and fantasy cinema. It even happens in books, in video games – in everything. Somebody brings up a high-concept idea featuring characters we already love, slaps a huge budget on it, and releases it. And then you go to the theater, all excited, and…

Meh. It was okay.

That’s a weird feeling, right? Like, I really wanted to love Solo in the same way I wanted to love the original Hulk movie (Eric Bana! ANG LEE!) and was really excited to see Will Smith in The Wild Wild West and Sean Connery in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and then I saw these things and it just didn’t happen. The more I thought about the movies, the more I got pissed off. They had everything going for them! Why don’t I love them?

Now, of course, there’s no magic bullet here – each of these films wasn’t that great on its own merits. Hell, The League of ExtraordinaryGentlemen was actively terrible. Some other movies fall into this category that I actually liked quite a bit – JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot comes to mind – but, despite my enjoyment, I recognize as deeply flawed works that fall short of their potential. In any event, I do think there’s a common thread to a lot of them that’s worth teasing out and discussing: most of them are ham-fisted.

Ham-fisted is a slightly more intense version of “ham-handed” and it basically means the films lack subtlety, grace, or wit. They are dull, meat-headed slogs that fail to understand what it is they’re doing. They are, in a word, stupid movies made about a smart premise. See, stupid movies made about a stupid idea are a whole other category of thing – they are B-movie thrillers and brainless entertainment. Smart movies made about stupid ideas are your cult classics and secret masterpieces. But stupid movies made about smart ideas are ham-fisted. And there’s a hell of a lot of them out there, with Solo as the most recent example.

This is it. This is all we wanted.

To discuss Solo specifically, here’s what I feel like happened (outside of the directorial hell the movie went through, which is very likely why it wound up doing this). In order for this movie to be a glorious romp all you needed to do was have Han meet Chewie, put them in the Falcon, and have them run their first smuggling run. That’s. It. It isn’t complicated, it isn’t flashy – we want to see Han, we want to see Chewie, and we also want the Falcon and Lando. Then we want a heist story.

And…we kinda got that? Sort of. But the movie overreacted. Not only did we meet Chewie and Lando and get the Falcon, we had to have Han get his last name and his blaster and the Falcon to get its nav-computer and have another asteroid chase scene (with the same damned music!) and see the Kessel Run and have a robot uprising and talk about the Rebellion and have Han Shoot First and see stupid Darth Maul. And it was all graceless and blunt and so obviously forced. And all of this was done because the filmmakers really wanted to give us the entire “Solo” experience which they interpreted as meaning “giving the fans what they want.” They seem to have had a storyboard somewhere that had a checklist of winks/nods to the audience and you literally couldn’t go five minutes in that movie without somebody cramming another reference down your throat.

Darth Maul’s cameo is a great example of this. “Hey,” says the filmmakers, “you know what these nerds like? Darth Maul!” “But he’s dead,” says a guy and then some other, nerdier guy in a sarcastic T-shirt explains a subplot from Star WarsRebels and everybody’s like “Oh, so it’s canon!” and bam – Facetime with Darth Maul. And then, while we’re all looking at Darth Maul thinking to ourselves “is that really him or some other guy of the same species” he ignites his lightsaber (so we know he’s serious) and we all kind of blink and wonder “did he just ignite his lightsaber while on a phone call?” That, friends, is the epitome of ham-fisted storytelling. Just cramming shit in there that they think we’d like, but lacking any grace or rationale.

And there’s one thing that the ham-fisted story forgets every single time. They always assume that characters are a summation of their clothes and their stuff and their fight scenes and forgets entirely that what really makes a story work is the deep character foundations you lay down that you can build conflict on top of. To that end, the Solo and Kira relationship worked. The Chewie and Han worked, too, if somewhat less well (they don’t really have a good moment together). But you know what was squandered? The Han/Lando relationship doesn’t go anywhere. Nor does the Han/Beckett relationship. Nor does really any other relationship. We are too busy with the heist and picking out the signposts that tell us it’s a Solo movie to notice that we’re actually watching a Solo movie. We have missed the forest for the trees.

All of that doesn’t mean Solo was a bad time. But it does mean Solo could have been a much better time. And I wouldn’t even say this is a result of people not caring what they produced – I think they gave it an honest shot. But they didn’t do it with grace or subtlety. I know, I know – a bunch of you out there just yelled “but Han lacks grace and subtlety!” I don’t mean that – I’m not talking about the exact plot, just about how that plot was conveyed. Look we all know Inigo Montoya is going to fight the six-fingered man. We know it. But what does the Princess Bride do the moment they face on another? He runs away! Why? Because it is totally in keeping with his character and, no matter how much the audience wants a duel, the filmmakers knew that the audience is not always right. If you give the people what they want, when they want it, all the time, the people become bored. Very very bored.

We all know Han is going to get the Falcon. We all know he’s going to win at cards. We all know they need the Falcon to complete their mission. So when Han loses at cards, we are surprised, yeah, but we also know that nothing has been settled because that’s not how it happens anyway and because the movie is mismanaging the Han/Lando relationship, nothing comes of it, and Han winds up flying the ship everywhere anyway and so, in the end, that whole card scene was a waste of time. No build. No dramatic tension. All we get is why Lando pronounces Han’s name wrong. Ham-fisted.

I’m usually running at least one RPG campaign at any given time. The precise game varies widely, I write up my own settings and rules sometimes, and I even mock up my own game systems. The last few years, however, have been devoted to Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, which I think is the best version of the game to date. I originally had plans to run three campaigns, all set in the world of Greyhawk immediately following the end of the Greyhawk Wars. The first two are over and now I’m on the third. This campaign follows not new heroes, not young up-and-comers, not ambitious rookies – this game is about old, war-scarred veterans getting together to save the world one last time.

A bunch of bad-asses, in other words.

In other words, it’s a high level campaign. Players begin play at 12th level and I expect them to go as high as 18th, maybe even 19th level.

I wanted to do this simply because this so rarely happens. Most of us start play at 1st (maaybe 2nd or 3rd level) scrabble our way to 10th, maybe 12th, and by that time (after years of gameplay has gone by), everybody gets tired and all the PCs get retired and you either start over or play a whole new game in some other system/setting. This time, though, I wanted to focus exclusively on the craziness that can be a high-level campaign. To get it to work, however, required some planning.

These People Are Not New

The first thing I decided was important was to make sure the characters’ in-game history was in place. These are not people coming from nowhere and encountering a totally new world – these are mighty heroes who once walked these very lands, probably shaping them into what they are now. That needed to be represented. Accordingly, character creation was a 4 session process (yes – 4 sessions) wherein I had the players go around and describe to one another their early adventures, how they met up, what kinds of successes and failures they had, and how they ultimately broke up as a group before the game began.

The purpose of this was to build-in history for the players to riff off of. There is rarely a village they’re going to go to that they haven’t been before, there is no king who doesn’t know their names – all of that needs to be ingrained in the players’ minds. It takes a lot of work to get players in a place where they feel comfortable in the world they’re inhabiting, and all that backstory helped us build it.

This leads to how I handled Character Traits/Flaws/Ideals and so on: titles. For each stage of life, the PC’s actions earned them a title which has followed them for the rest of their lives. So, we have Severus Manhunter, whom the elves call “the Mortal Fool” for his decades-long romance with a forbidden elf maid and also Miles Maywater the Ungrateful, the Hound of Veluna – the world’s most famous “noble” assassin/monk. This kind of texture, I think, has gone a long way to making this game cool.

The PCs Can Take It

There really isn’t that much I can’t sic on my players that they can’t handle, and that’s fun. The amount of damage they can dish out (and take) is really impressive. Their first encounter? 50 orcs, 10 orogs, an ork shaman, a merrow, and a succubus all catching them in an ambush on a river boat. There were four players – a ranger, an assassin, a warlock, and a bard. They should be screwed, right?

Wrong! They slaughtered just about every single one of those jokers and only one of their own was hurt enough to require significant healing magic.

Hell, I had them take on an adult Black Dragon in her lair and they won (if barely)! This campaign has been worth the time if only for that one encounter!

Indeed, suddenly the entire Monster Manual is open to me (well…not the Tarrasque) – this party can drop dice with the best of them, freeing up what happens on a grand scale. In fact, part of the premise of the whole campaign is that they need to kill a demigod.

The Conflict Is Not From the Monsters

The fact that these PCs are all such powerhouses, however, means that the conflict isn’t just “can we survive the Fire Giant’s Castle,” because it’s very clear that they can. Conflicts suddenly involve not killing things as often as killing things. As major regional players, they have influence and reputations to safeguard, they have decades of history (and old feuds) to make them squabble, and they have old enemies that know them as well as they know themselves. While this campaign is certainly not going to become Game of Thrones, it is really fun that survival isn’t the primary driving force – it is success, and the argument over what constitutes success is the central conflict. One of their old friends – their dearest confidant – has gone missing and they have been left a note by her to not seek to save her, but instead complete her last mission. Will they do it? Can they? Predictably, two of the party want to complete the mission, the other two want to find their friend. When will the conflict come to a head?

A Seat At the Table

As mighty heroes, the PCs are also now peers with most of the people in campaigns that spend their time bossing lesser PCs around. That king wants you to do something? Tell him no. Is he seriously going to come for a dragonslayer? Nope. No he isn’t.

And that, in and of itself, is freeing for the PCs! They don’t need to be second banana. They don’t need to go find Gandalf to save their asses – they are Gandalf! They’re the big fish and they get to chart their own destiny, whatever that is. So, when it comes time to save the world, they don’t need to have the cavalry swoop in and defeat the grand evil at the last minute (as so many campaigns have done in the past) – they strike the deathblow, they create the ritual to close the hellmouth, they are the ones holding all the cards and distributing all the secrets.

Pretty cool, right?

Of course, doing this requires me to be very flexible and willing to allow the players to break things. It means putting them in a position of power and really letting them exercise that power. Not all DMs are comfortable with that, but I think it can be a really exciting experience for both players and DMs to try out.

Each time a novel of mine comes out, I amuse myself by casting the would-be movie of the book. Not that this will ever happen. Furthermore, even if it were to happen (Hollywood, you know where to find me!), there’s no way I’d have any say in this anyway.

But I digress!

The third book of The Saga of the Redeemed, Dead But Once, is now available for sale! I’m doing publicity stuff, too! See my interview over on Dan Koboldt’s blog, or my guest post over with Bishop O’Connell! And now we come to my own little sales pitch: casting the movie of the book which will never be made into a movie! Will this entice you to buy? WHO KNOWS?

There’s only one way to find out, right? So:

Tyvian Reldamar

Played by: Neil Patrick Harris

Tyvian is suave, debonair, and also a lot of trouble. Harris’s portrayal of Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother sets him up well for the role, I think. He’s fit without being too bulky, he’s good-looking in a rakish sort of way, and I could totally see him complaining about sub-par wine.

Myreon Alafarr

Played by: Emily Blunt

Myreon is courageous, determined, and willing to get her hands dirty in the name of justice. It’s taken me a while to narrow down the right choice for her, but when I saw Edge of Tomorrow, I knew she was my girl. Ms. Blunt can play the Gray Lady with style, I tell you.

Artus

Played by: Tom Holland

Much like Myreon, it’s taken me a while to nail this one down. This is, in large part, because I just couldn’t identify any 14-year-old actors for prior books. For Dead But Once, though, Artus is 16 and on the threshold of manhood, and nobody’s been doing that better in an action/adventure setting than Tom Holland’s brilliant portrayal of Peter Parker in the MCU. He’d be perfect for my idealistic, somewhat naive, and desperately-trying-to-be-cool Artus.

Lyrelle Reldamar

Played by: Michelle Pfeiffer

Lyrelle Reldamar, the most powerful sorceress in the world, is a woman who has seen to it that she’s aged gracefully. She’s stunning and forceful – when she walks into a room, everyone stares. She is a queen even among other royalty, and I think Pfeiffer has the charisma and the look to pull the role off very well. She also could, conceivably, be seen as a plausible mother to Neil Patrick Harris.

Hool

Played by: Gwendolyn Christie

Now, Christie would definitely be mostly CGI in this role, since Hool is an enormous hairy gnoll and she is nothing of the kind. But I think she has the physicality, the voice, and the presence to pull off the powerful Lady Hool and, conversely, when Hool is wearing her shroud, Christie could easily pull off the look of “Hool pretending to be a human” with all the intimidating glares and sharp words that such a thing entails.

Brana

Played by: Unknown

Much like Artus in earlier books, I’m not really sure what young person we could find to play the (also mostly CGI) gnoll pup. They’d need to be able to stand on their head, for one thing, and their human-as-puppy impersonation would need to be spot on. I’m open to suggestions.

Valen Hesswyn

Played by: Andrew Garfield

I don’t know about you, but something about Andrew Garfield’s face just has “I’m a teenage jerk-face” written all over it. Valen is a bit older than Artus, a bully, but is a charismatic member of Eretherian society besides that, and something about Garfield’s mug just fits the bill.

Dame Velia Hesswyn, Countess of Davram

Played by: Dame Judy Dench

Countess Velia is past her prime and yet is a powerful voice in Eretherian society and an eminent member of the peerage. She is constantly plotting and scheming to advance her own house, and bears herself with dignity at all times. Dench could play anything, of course, but this I think she could hit out of the park.

Adatha Voth

Played by: Anne Hathaway

The woman plotting to kill Tyvian Reldamar by any means necessary and the woman Tyvian Reldamar can’t help but be drawn to has to be somebody special. Hathaway’s excellent portrayal of Catwoman (in the otherwise terrible Dark Knight Rises) shows that she has the capacity to be playful and sexy and dangerous all in one.

Banric Sahand

Played by: Ron Perlman

You guys, you guys – I think I finally nailed this one. I’ve had a lot of trouble in the past thinking of an actor who could physically embody the imposing and violent Sahand while also having the ability to deliver a perfect villain’s monologue in a booming baritone. Ron Perlman is my man. The Mad Prince (in my mind) could not look more like Perlman if he tried, and his delicious threats would sound so good in his voice.

Xahlven Reldamar

Played by: Simon Baker

Xahlven is a tough one, if only because he has to fit into that Reldamar phenotype, be a bit older than Tyvian, and be arguably more handsome. He needs a brilliant smile and a smooth voice, too. Baker, I think, fits the bill, though I haven’t seen him in anything other than The Mentalist, so I don’t know how well he can play the villain. In any case, him, Pfeiffer, and Harris would make for an interesting family dynamic, I bet.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. There are a lot of secondary characters out there I didn’t get to, but here’s the core of the book, for sure. I think it would make a pretty cool movie, myself. Of course, I would, wouldn’t I?

After having a conversation with my agent the other day, I’ve decided my next novel project is going to be time travel based. I wasn’t really planning to write this particular novel at this particular time, but he feels its the best career move right now and that’s basically what I’m paying the guy for – his advice – so why wouldn’t I take it? Anyway, the point here is that I’ve been thinking (a lot) about time travel in stories today and I want to share some of my ramblings.

One of the questions I’ve gotten recently is how the character in my time travel story is going to travel through time. What are the rules, in other words? Is time linear or non-linear in this story? Are we going to be dealing with the Grandfather Paradox or the Butterfly Effect or what? What about free will? Now, it just so happens that I have answers to these questions, but I’m not going to list them out here today. Instead, I’m going to talk a fair bit about how those questions aren’t actually that important. Or, at least, not as important as they first appear.

Pick a method – it doesn’t really matter.

Time travel stories, you see, are really never about how time travel is accomplished. Never. Time travel stories are actually all about why the characters in question are traveling in time in the first place. This is also true more broadly of many science fiction stories of whatever subcategory – the special technology is usually more a metaphor for something present and actual rather than a literal exploration of technological progress – but it is particularly true of time travel, since, of all speculative technologies, time travel is possibly the least plausible outside of traveling at relativistic speeds (and then you could only go one direction – the future). If you want to go back in time instead of just forwards (in other words if you want an actual time machine), you kinda have to throw away most known physics anyway. If you’re doing something that impossible, does the fact that you’re traveling by Police Box or hot tub or phone booth really matter?

In other words, the rules, in large part, are arbitrary. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to tell a time travel story in terms of how the deed is accomplished and the rules surrounding said deed. Do we really question that the time machine in the Terminator can only send organic matter? I mean, it makes no sense, but do we care? Likewise, in Back to the Future, the Flux Capacitor makes absolutely zero sense, but, again, we don’t really care. We don’t care because we aren’t watching to movie to learn about how time works. We’re watching the movie to revisit our past.

And that’s really the crux of it: the journey through time is always (always) a metaphor that directly pertains to the main character’s conflict. Sarah Connor has to face the reality of her world ending and how best to prepare for that (the precise dimensions of that preparation and what it symbolizes varies from film to film). Marty McFly has to come to terms with his own parents and, thereby, his own identity. It is a crisis of self confidence, not a Hill Valley crisis. Even the Doctor and his TARDIS aren’t exploring space-time to teach us lessons about history, but rather to explore the human condition (and an outside observer’s opinion of it) in infinite contexts and scenarios. It’s not a show about aliens at all – it’s a love letter to humanity.

So, if you’re going to put together a time travel story, how you have the character traveling through time is a question subservient to why you want them to travel through time to begin with. Depending on what your purpose is – what themes you want to explore – the way time travel happens will itself be altered to fit your narrative goals. And you can do this, too! Time machines are impossible – as impossible as magic and even more impossible than things like hyperdrive or lightsabers or giant battle robots. In other words, it’s something of a blank slate – tell the tale you need to. Your audience isn’t tuning in for technical merit – they’re expecting a story about the human condition.

This is going to be one of those partially writing/partially gaming posts, so get ready for some odd leaps in logic on my part. I want to start with a meme I saw on Dungeons and Dragons Memes the other day regarding dungeon crawls in D&D:

I hate this list. Hate it. Hate it hate it. It represents what I consider to be everything wrong with how Dungeons and Dragons is frequently played and it also happens to be a blueprint on how not to write a suspenseful story or novel. Let me explain:

People avoid conflict and tension as much as they can in their daily lives. If something looks dangerous, we are unlikely to attempt it without ample preparation with the (accurate) understanding that doing so increases our odds of survival. This is a sensible and reasonable way to live one’s life.

It also makes for bad storytelling.

Of course, not every moment of our days are devoted to having an awesome story to tell. If it were, we’d take more risks and do more dangerous things because, well, it would make a great story. Yes, we would punch that guy on the train playing his music without headphones. Yes, we would give the sketchy homeless person a ride on the handlebars of our moped. Yes, we would go on solo vacations to distant lands without a hotel reservation on a whim. We’d hitchhike more.

We don’t do all this, for the most part, because we recognize the odds of unpleasant things happening to us in the real world. In a story (or an RPG), however, unpleasant things happening is the express point of the exercise. Nobody reads a story about how a guy wakes up, goes to his job, does his work, comes home, and goes to bed. That isn’t a story (or at least not an interesting one). We need conflict, of course, but conflict is also not enough. A story where a guy goes to work, discovers he has a hugely important meeting in five minutes and he left his materials at home, but then realizes he can just use the backup materials on his work computer, prints them out, and all is well is also a super boring story. Nothing came of the conflict.

Now, to that stupid list up there. When I read that advice, this is what I see:

Research Your Destination: There must be no surprises, unpleasant or otherwise. We must know everything before beginning.

Explore Thoroughly and Cautiously: Everything must be done slowly and methodically so that no surprises crop up and no mistakes are made.

Stay Together: IF something goes wrong, the problem can be immediately solved with little difficulty and at minimal risk to others.

Prepare Accordingly: We must have access to all the appropriate tools at the appropriate times so that obstacles can be smoothly overcome.

Exercise Teamwork: Interpersonal conflicts are forbidden and independent goals must not be pursued.

Check for Secret Traps and Doors: Again, no surprises! Slow down!

Take Everything That Isn’t Nailed Down: Approach this dramatic event with all the drama of a moving company packing up a house.

Everything on that list is devoted to making certain the dungeon crawl is as boring as possible, which is to say they are designed to guarantee nobody gets in trouble and everything goes to plan. This list exists for two reasons: (1) there are people who see D&D as a resource management enterprise and nothing else and (2) there are a variety of bad GMs out there who see it as their job to have an adversarial relationship with the party, forcing the players to adopt these behaviors so they don’t die. In the first case, I would insist everybody is entitled to their own kind of fun and more power to them (though I don’t care for it myself). In the second case, read this list, GMs, and adjust your ways.

What most players refuse to acknowledge, but is nevertheless true, is that the best gaming experiences are when things go wrong. This is because when the players make mistakes, tension, excitement, and conflict abound. When the players sit down and concoct an elaborate plan designed to avoid any kind of trouble, it is the GMs duty – their sacred obligation – to mess those plans up as soon as possible and in the worst of all ways. Players often think the GM is being “mean” or “unfair” when, in actuality, the GM is giving the players the greatest possible opportunity for fun. Because (and this is the other thing players are not aware of) they are going to win! They are! By the skin of their teeth and suffering consequences galore and maybe not in the way they intended, but they totally are and they are going to love it.

If he’d estimated the weight of that bag of dirt right, this scene would have sucked.

This is directly analogous to storytelling. If your characters make an elaborate plot that is almost sure to succeed, then you, as the writer, can’t have that plot go off exactly as planned. You just can’t. Once you do, then you have abandoned all dramatic tension and eliminated all suspense. We all just shrug and go “oh, well, that was a lot of buildup about nothing.” You need things to go sideways! Polonius needs to get his ass stabbed through the curtain! The hyperdrive on the Falcon has to be broken! Indiana Jones needs to spring the trap!

So, here are my competing pieces of dungeon crawling advice:

Do Minimal Research: If the old geezer in the village says the temple is inhabited by vengeful spirits, believe him. He probably knows what he’s talking about, right? No way it’s a death cult disguised as ghosts. That’d just be silly.

Go Directly for the Goal: There is almost certainly nothing of interest in those little side passages. The main thing is to get in, get out, and get on with your lives. Move quickly! The time of the Planetary Alignment is nigh!

Split Up!: You can cover more ground that way. Also, some of you can get in trouble and need rescuing, which gives everybody a chance to look awesome.

Travel light!: Nobody wants to traipse around a dungeon with a donkey in tow or have to pay henchmen to guard your campsite or any of that garbage. Potion of Animal Friendship? Pfft – that probably won’t come in handy anyway. Extra sword? Why? Your favorite sword should do just fine. And leave the rope behind – rope is heavy.

Those Morons Need to Listen to You!: Look, you’re the wizard, right? You are the smartest. Who cares what the paladin thinks is a good plan – you’ve got a better plan and, when it works (it won’t!), then everybody will recognize you as the leader of this stupid little band. Excelsior!

Spring the Trap!: If you don’t spring the trap, nobody will fall into a hole and maybe die. And seriously, what fun is that, anyway?

Gold is Heavy: You know what’s more fun that haggling over objet d’art and divvying up silver pieces? Moving the story forward, that’s what. You’re playing a game, not saving for your retirement. Take the cool magical junk and leave the rest behind. Nobody cares how much money you have.

There is a question all writers are asked all the time. In fact, if you’ve ever published anything – or even if you haven’t – I can more-or-less guarantee you’ve been asked this at minimum six times this year. I would even go so far as to argue this question is a primary reason somebody might decline to identify themselves as an author at a party with mixed company. The question is this:

Where do you get your ideas?

This question is totally understandable. All writers see where the questioner is coming from when they get this – obviously somebody who doesn’t spend their spare time coming up with weird little stories to entertain people might wonder how on Earth this process occurs. The problem is, though, that the answer to this question is too vastly complicated and esoteric to clearly relate. For instance, when I am asked this, I often feel like asking a series of follow-up questions:

Do you mean general ideas or specific ideas?

Do you want to know where the ideas originate spatially, mentally, or temporally in relation to one another?

Are you asking what my artistic influences are, or how I come up with ideas I term as original?

Also, what constitutes an “idea?” Like, what if the story originated with an idea I didn’t end up using? Do you want to hear about that?

Are you asking out of curiosity, or do you, yourself, wish to generate your own ideas and want tips as to how?

And I could go on. A lot of times, when asked this question, I shrug and say “a weird childhood,” even though that is not really true in many ways. Mostly I do this to see how seriously they want to know because, like, if you actually want to know, I can talk to you for hours and hours. And hours.

Like, you should probably get a beverage and comfortable chair.

For the purposes of this blog post, however, I’m going to skip past the original, general concept “idea” – the bolt of lighting, if you will, that strikes you and gets the wheels turning. Let’s just assume that happens by whatever eldritch psychic alchemy blesses all creative people and move on to what, for me, is the more interesting stage: Idea development.

What Do I Do With This Stuff?

GOBLINS!

It occurred to me recently that I really think goblins are cool and that I don’t read enough stories about their petty, vicious, mean-spirited little lives, brief though they are. This has begun to simmer on a back burner in my head. Let’s talk about next steps.

What kind of story will this be?

This is the first question I ask myself. What is the tone I want to evoke? Is my goblin story going to be funny, sad, mysterious, scary, angry – what? What, basically, will be the most fun for me.

How can my story create this mood or tone?

I begin to think about what my goblins will be like, in broad strokes – not so much individual characters, but things like culture and environment that would have shaped their behavior. If I’m trying to write a scary story, how can I combine the elements I want (scary and goblin protagonists) in a way that seems plausible, believable, and entertaining. This is where I stare to come to grips with the world itself. I start to map out big ideas – who has the power? Who doesn’t? Why is the world this way? How do the goblins fit into this world? Is this world evoking the proper mood or tone to fit the kind of story I want to tell? If not, how can I change it to do so?

Whose story is this?

This question and the next question sometimes swap positions with me, but a lot of times I get to character next. So, I’ve got this funny/scary/angry goblin world – who is my main character? How do they fit inside this world? What is the conflict they are seeking to resolve (i.e. what do they want?). If I have a boring main character, I don’t have a story, do I? My characters morph and change a lot before they actually appear on the page. It’s like forging something or maybe sculpting/whittling – I’ve got a raw hunk of material that needs to be honed and shaped into something useful and beautiful.

What happens in this story?

Next is plot (or sometimes plot is first). Just because I have a person living in this world doesn’t mean there’s a story yet. This is often a place where my ideas stall – okay, so I have a goblin character living in a goblins world doing their goblin thing but that’s not a story. Slice of life tales I find pretty boring, frankly. I want action. Honestly, silly as it is, I often find myself coming back to this meme:

Fake Leo Tolstory is kinda right, guys. I mess around with those three basic ideas and see if I can come up with something new and interesting.

Who is telling the story?

The last step I go through when developing an idea is this one: who is telling the story? Whose voice will best evoke the tone and mood I want? Is this going to be Third Person or First Person (please note that I cannot stand second person and won’t do it)? Will I have multiple POVs or just one? I can’t write anything until I know what the story is going to sound like in my head. My style is a bit fluid; I alter it to suit the tale. Perhaps this is a bad idea, but it’s one that makes writing fun and challenging and interesting for me.

Once that is in place – once I know whose story it is and what is going to happen and who is telling it and where it is set and what kind of mood I wish to evoke – the only thing that’s left is writing the damned thing.

I was recently interviewed for the podcast Yes and Dragons, which discusses how improv/improvisational theater and RPGs intersect. In the interview, I discuss how improv, gaming, and writing intersect quite a bit, and it was a really fun interview. Go and check it out and, if you liked it, check out the other episodes of the podcast, which will be releasing once a week going forward.

Oh, and there was something amiss with my microphone during the interview, so it sounds as though I’m talking inside an airplane hangar. Sorry.

Anyway, give it a listen! If you’re interested in any one of those three topics, I hope you will find it enlightening or otherwise useful.

I’ve been pissed off at the world lately. Each day brings a new outrage, a new soul-crushing horror, and while I wouldn’t say it’s directly harming my capacity to write, it is having an effect on how I want to write. Emotions – the writer’s emotions – transfer onto the page. They kind of have to, right? If we’re to be writing in a genuine voice, then some aspect of our emotional sphere is going to show up in what we write.

(grumble grumble)

Now, typically, I have written from a relatively calm emotional state. If I’m too upset, I can’t concentrate on the words. But the flares of anger of late have dulled into glowing hot coals that just simmer there, deep inside me. I should note that none of this anger is directed towards my friends or family or coworkers or students – this is a broader kind of rage, targeted at the political sphere more than anywhere else. Venting my rage, then, at the people around me could never be justified – they have done nothing and do not deserve it. Also, of course, venting into the Void (i.e. Twitter) is hardly cathartic and certainly not constructive.

The outlet remaining to me is my writing.

I am no fan of angry political screeds thinly veiled as fiction. I find those things generally tedious. But, of course, I am nevertheless tempted to vent my frustrations at the world in some kind of story, anyway. This story would be ugly and unkind, I have no doubt. It wouldn’t really be the kind of story I want to be a part of. But it’s still there, gnawing at the edge of my imagination. Write me, it growls, let me out.

I don’t, though. Because I’m not ready yet. Anger, you see, isn’t enough. You can’t write a story that’s nothing but anger and expect it to work. Not enough range for a novel, too crass for a screenplay, and too on the nose for a short. I need something else. I need the hope that tempers the anger, I need the calm rational voice to make the story more than just a primal scream of rage. I need the voice of civilization.

Saw a tweet from Sam Sykes the other day which has been kicking around in my head ever since. I tried to find it to post, but I can’t seem to track it down, so you’ll just have to put up with a loose paraphrase. Essentially, Sykes, in response to the newest Star Wars movie, Solo, observed that he kinda preferred not knowing exactly what the Kessel Run was or what Han and Chewie got up to. He worries that this “obsessive canonization” cheats the audience out of their own imaginations, which are more evocative and powerful anyway.

The thing that stuck with me here is the simple fact that I love worldbuilding (and I get waaay too obsessive about it), but I also very much understand that worldbuilding does not create story and, in fact, it can potentially take away from story. I think Sykes has a really important point there – leaving spaces in your world building allows the reader to fill in blanks in potentially wonderful and exciting ways. As a writer, you shouldn’t even try to explain everything – you merely need to fill in enough so that the audience can do the rest.

Reading is a collaborative process. That sounds weird – reading is done alone and writing is done alone, so how is this possible? Well, the reader and the writer are still engaged in a kind of collaboration, just one that is separated by space and time. If you read a book of mine, you are getting my end of a story. You, however, as reader fill in many of the gaps in that story. And furthermore, you fill them in typically in a way that makes the story more interesting to you. The more I fill in for you, the less work you have to do (which can be good), but also it makes your imagination do less for you. Imagination is key, though – as a writer, you want your book to set the reader’s mind aflame with possibility and wonder. Too much detail can kill that magic.

Star Wars is a perfect example of this. Much of the magic of the original trilogy was rooted in the fact that it hinted at a much larger world, but didn’t bother to codify that world. You were left to wonder what Kessel was, why Tibanna gas was valuable, what the Old Republic was like, etc., etc.. For every mystery it revealed, it hinted at more mysteries. People sunk themselves into that world because they wanted to explore (and they could explore!).

I don’t know what I expected, but I expected the Clone Wars to be cooler than this. Which is kinda my point.

Think, then, of the let-down that the prequel trilogy was. We saw the old republic and fought the clone wars and they were, well, kinda lame. The Jedi were dull. Even Palpatine was a bit of a bummer. Anakin Skywalker? We didn’t even like the guy. The desire to reveal too much about the world – to canonize even more – was a killer. When you throw in the obsessive canonization contained within the EU, we quickly arrive at one of the major reasons The Last Jedi got such negative reactions from hardcore fans. They felt as though they already knew what could and should happen, and then the movie changed that. They felt as though they were dealing with an already explained world and that TLJ was breaking the rules. And, in a sense, they were right, except that the world they thought they knew was being rewritten, and so all the old stuff doesn’t apply anymore. This, incidentally, is good for the long term health of Star Wars, but it doesn’t seem that way to people who have gotten themselves invested in what is “canon” and what isn’t.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that every detail you nail down in a story is a detail you can’t change later very easily. The more you nail down, the less can change. The less that can change, the more stale the world becomes until, at last, it is rigid and boring and only appeals to those old hardcore fans (who are always the minority, anyway). As a writer, then, it becomes an important challenge to figure out how much to reveal to keep the story evocative and immersive and how much to leave blank so that the audience can build an even better world into their imagination.

Just re-posting this, as the Nebula deadline looms.
Additional writing update: Book 4 of the Saga of the Redeemed has a complete draft in the hands of my agent and beta readers. It’s now just a matter of making final revisions before it is submitted!

So, it’s Nebula Award season again. This year, I am eligible for my novelette “The Masochist’s Assistant” in the July/August issue of F&SF! If you’re in the SFWA and eligible to nominate works, I’d appreciate the nod – I’m very proud of the story, it got good reviews, and I’m told a copy of it is available to read on the SFWA forums (for members only). Go and check it out!

Additionally, the copy-edits of Book 3 in The Saga of the Redeemed, DEAD BUT ONCE, are done! Done! The book is off and set to release in March April. April is the release date, the 17th to be precise. You can pre-order a copy through this link. Go and check it out!

Well, that’s it for me, for now. I’ve got the fourth (and final) book of the series to finish, and so off…